While it’s nice to have different widgets to accommodate different users and websites, we would have liked to see a single widget that could deliver the content of all 7 widgets combined. User interface is always a difficult thing to deal with due to the limited size of widgets. However, in this case the NBC Olympic widgets are a decent size and there are already several rows of controls. A left/right scrolling menu system could have easily added the functionality to provide more content.

New York and Mc Lean, VA, June 10, 2008 — KickApps, the leading on demand social media platform, and Clearspring Technologies Inc., the world’s largest widget syndication and tracking service, today announced a strategic partnership to further accelerate widget usage and monetization. Under the agreement, Clearspring will promote KickApps’ new WYSIWYG Widget Studio (currently in beta), a self-service widget-authoring environment to the Clearspring user base. This will enable Clearspring customers to easily build their own rich-media and interactive widgets with tremendous ease. KickApps will use Clearspring’s powerful distribution and tracking services to provide one-click distribution and in-depth analytics to anyone using the KickApps Platform.

Congratulations to Hooman and everyone over at Clearspring. This shows a healthy widget ecosystem and the numbers reported by Clearspring are impressive.

126M unique widget viewers in March

More than 33B widget views served since its launch in 2007

Official Press Release:

WORLD’S LARGEST WIDGET SYNDICATOR CLEARSPRING SECURES $18 MILLION IN FUNDING

New Enterprise Associates Leads the Round

McLean, Va., May 21, 2008 — Clearspring Technologies Inc., the world’s largest widget syndication and tracking service, has secured $18 million in a series C funding round that includes leading venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Novak Biddle Venture Partners and other current investors. The new round will fund expansion of Clearspring’s viral marketing network, which currently serves and tracks almost four billion widgets monthly. It will also be used to extend Clearspring’s reach into international markets and further develop its rapidly growing advertising network and vast data infrastructure and optimization services. Clearspring’s category leadership is well-established — according to comScore’s Widget Metrix report, Clearspring tallied 126 million unique widget viewers in March 2008, making it the No. 1 widget platform in the world.

“No other widget company has the breadth of relationships with content publishers, advertisers, developers and social media, as well as the full suite of widget services including syndication, in-depth analytics and easy-to-use monetization tools,” said Harry Weller, partner at NEA. “Clearspring is the leader in this space, and we look forward to working with the company as it expands its platform and extends its reach into global markets.”

By the looks of the “Add This” tool, we believe this is powered by Clearspring. Seems like Clearspring has popped up a lot when covering widgets. Not surprising considering that comScore puts Clearspring tied at number 2 with more than 39 million unique viewer in November 2007, as reported on TechCrunch.